AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Theo knocked with a loose fist, the other jammed in his coat pocket. Me, I hastily pulled the hood down and smoothed out my tossed salad hair, as if royalty would be greeting us and not a smarmy connection of the Saxons’.
A muffled “Yeah?” could be heard through the thick wood.
“It’s me,” Theo said.
A couple of metal clicks, and the door opened. A very tall, bald black man stepped into the light.
It took me a second, but—“Omigod, I remember you.”
His opaque eyes slid in my direction and he looked me up and down in much the way he did when I’d made my first foray into the poker underground.
“You were the bouncer at Theo’s games.”
A brief nod, and right when I thought I’d thoroughly unimpressed him in the exact way I had when we’d initially met, he said, “Where’d your rainbow hair go?”
I was surprisingly flattered by his remembrance. “The way of my innocent youth.”
Again, he nodded, but it was to Theo with a bemused expression. I was about to ponder why, until Theo gave him a hard nod and asked, “She inside?”
“Hasn’t stepped outside since we got here,” the bouncer responded.
He pushed the door wider, and Theo stepped in. Intrigued, I followed, feeling Bo’s survey of me as I passed.
“Who are we meeting?” I asked Theo.
“The mistake.”
I chewed on that, recalling Theo’s explanation in the car—heard amidst sheer terror—and recalled him speaking of a mistake Trace had made.
The dim hallway had our forms taking shape only because of a single bulb above our heads. The wallpaper had gone from floral to a deep red and white damask pattern, the white curled and yellowed with age and cigarette smoke. The dark wooden floorboards creaked beneath our feet, evoking sympathy toward the downstairs neighbor, if the apartments below were occupied.
The feel of the place was slumlord, or at the very least, a squat house. If a rat scurried across my feet, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Um.”
Both of them paused in the hallway at my voice.
“Can I…” Good God, I didn’t want to, but I had to.
“Bathroom,” Theo surmised.
The bouncer said, “Go right when we go left.”
I dipped my chin in thanks and separated from them when the bouncer directed. I turned the heavy brass knob, horrified that I’d be forced to use these facilities that could very well give me scabies—
The white was blinding. The porcelain sink even more so. Every part of this John had been cleaned so thoroughly my nose tickled at the smell of lemon and bleach still in the air.
Feeling much more relaxed, I went about my business, washed my hands, and exited, taking the first archway on the left, where Theo and his bouncer had gone.
Upon rounding the corner, a sofa chair came into view and the person in it. I gasped, then covered it up with a cough and a hand over my mouth. Theo cast a cutting look my way and I waved an apology, muttering, “If you would tell me about these things beforehand, maybe I’d be more prepared.”
A skeletal girl—woman?—sat within the stained, pilled green fabric, an IV bag dripping to her right. Her brunette hair hung in lanky hunks, tangled with clotted blood, her spaghetti strap red dress that draped over her shoulders reminiscent of a clothes hangar, but none of that gave me pause.
It was her face, and the flesh that coated it. There was no pink flush, no Caucasian beige skin the way the rest of her indicated it should be. It was purple, mottled. My molars ached for her. One eye was swollen shut and her lower jaw hung as loose as her clothes. Her lips, which upon closer inspection, should have been plump and dewy with youth, were cracked and bleeding. One cheekbone was higher than the other, and a deep slash, stitched haphazardly, marred the velvet smoothness underneath. A bandage, already dirtied with rust-colored blood, covered her nose.
“What happened to you?” I whispered.
She looked up, her jade green eyes spearing into my core, and I realized I’d spoken louder than I intended.
